If the man who has lived solely for sport is ill prepared to meet old age, he who has lived solely for business is still less so. He has had no time to cultivate his more human tastes but has developed his potentialities in only one direction and when superannuation comes his soul is bankrupt. He generally now has money as well as time to spend and so devotes himself to increasing his material comforts in a way that beckons death, because high living is no substitute for high thinking. He should discover the least atrophied of his powers and devote himself to their eleventh-hour development. The man of the modern nervous type should lay up treasure that age cannot corrupt. Herbert Spencer said the purpose of education was to prepare for complete living. One of the most beautiful and normal attributes of old age is interest in the young, without which age is lonely and life becomes, as the preacher said, “vanity of vanities.” “If old people are confined to the company of other old people, they hasten each other’s downward course.” There was “even a certain psychological truth symbolized in the old idea that the company of a young girl was the best means for the rejuvenescence of an old man.” “Never was the tendency to abandon old age to its own devices so strong as it is to-day.” Spencer thought the care of the aged by their dependents was the fit complement for the care that in earlier years had been devoted to them and regarded the imperfection of this return the great defect of our practical morals. Indeed, the author doubts “whether the aged were ever so much to be pitied as they are to-day.” The psychological needs of old age are greater than ever. In his _Health, Strength, and Happiness_,[107] he gives an earnest, practical caution for all, but especially for the aged, to eat less; and particularly so in warm weather. “We dig our graves with our teeth.” Fat is hardly a part of the body at all. Flesh is really muscle, so that the fat man should be said to be losing flesh. “The whole secret of prolonging one’s life consists in doing nothing to shorten it.” The writer profoundly believes in government by the elderly in years and thinks that the really greatest works in many of the most difficult fields have been done by them. He stresses the fact that there is a certain kind of wisdom that nothing but age can bring. He sees the chief cause of senile degeneration in the hardening of the arteries, due to the necessity of disposing of superfluous fat. A man is really as old as his mind and he doubts whether we are producing more really living elderly men and women than did the ancient world. He is bitter in his condemnation of the common phrase, “Too old at forty.”